The Early Big Win: What Gambling Research Shows

A heavyweight names the harder fight

Anthony Wint had one of the fastest arrivals in recent UFC history. On August 11, 2026, he knocked out Matt Adams in 34 seconds on Dana White's Contender Series to earn a contract, according to the NFL's writeup of his crossover. Eleven days later, on August 22, he submitted Terrance Chatman by arm-triangle choke at 4:29 of the first round in his UFC debut in Sacramento, per his UFC athlete profile.

Then, on Ariel Helwani's show on September 2, he described a fight that didn't happen in a cage.

"The battle wasn't Matthew Adams, the battle wasn't Terrance Chatman," Wint said, as reported by Sherdog. "The battle was having me sit in Vegas and not gamble. And by the grace of God, I was able to sit and would see slot machines and blackjack tables and know that I was stronger than the addiction I had before."

Wint was signed by the New York Jets as an undrafted free agent out of Florida International in 2018, appeared in two games, and was waived the following summer. By his own account, he spent his savings chasing an NFL comeback that never arrived, and he lived out of his car. He described the gambling as an eight-year stretch, and he traced its beginning to college, when a friend's father handed him $300. "I turned that $300 into $1,000, and in my head a switch went off."

We're reporting what Wint said on the record, and nothing more. He isn't affiliated with Cope Compass, he hasn't described a formal diagnosis, and speculating about either would be unfair to him. What his account is useful for is the mechanic he named, because that mechanic has a research literature, and the literature is more interesting than the folk version.

The big win hypothesis, and where it came from

The claim goes like this: a large payout early in someone's gambling life teaches a false lesson, and that lesson does the damage for years afterward.

It's the first stage in the phase model Dr. Robert Custer published in 1984, the framework we walk through in the stages of gambling addiction and recovery. Custer described a winning phase, then a losing phase, then desperation. A big early payout kicks off the arc, the payouts stop, the person keeps playing to get back to that feeling, and the harm accumulates from there.

Custer's model came from clinical observation of patients he treated, not from a controlled study, and that's the right way to hold it: as a description that thousands of clinicians have found useful for organizing what they see, not as a proven causal mechanism. It's a map, not a law.

What the evidence actually supports

Here's the honest state of the research, including the parts that cut against the tidy story.

A controlled lab test found nothing. In 2001, Kassinove and Schare had 180 undergraduates play a computerized four-wheel slot machine under an acquisition-extinction design, varying near-miss frequency and whether players got an early big payout. Near misses mattered a lot: persistence peaked when 30% of trials were near misses, an inverted-U pattern rather than a straight line. The big payout did not. As Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions summarized it in The WAGER, "whether or not the players had big wins was not significantly related to persistence."

The largest real-world test found a real effect, but a short one. In 2023, a team led by Timothy Edson at the Division on Addiction at Cambridge Health Alliance analyzed account records from bwin, a large European operator. They followed 36,328 people who bet on sports in February 2015 through July 2020, and matched each person who had a big payout to a similar person who played the same week and didn't.

About 25.9% of bettors experienced at least one big payout, defined two ways: Custer's threshold of any single prize of €1,000 or more, and a "prize ratio" measure flagging the top 1% of prizes relative to the person's own largest prior bet. Under both definitions, a big payout was followed by more bets, more money staked, larger stake sizes, and greater losses the following week.

And then it faded. Greo's research summary of the study_A%20large-scale%20prospective%20study%20of%20big%20wins%20among%20actual%20online%20sports%20bettors_final.pdf) puts the key result plainly: the effect "declined over time and mostly disappeared after four weeks," and the specific timing of a big payout did not meaningfully change future behavior. "Thus, there was no strong evidence of an early big win as all big wins had a similar effect regardless of their timing."

One disclosure that belongs in the open: that study was funded by a research contract between the Division on Addiction and Entain PLC, the gambling company that owns bwin. That doesn't invalidate the work, which is peer-reviewed and methodologically serious, but industry funding is a fact a reader is entitled to weigh.

Population surveys keep finding the association. In January 2025, Lelonek-Kuleta and colleagues published an analysis in Addictive Behaviors of nationally representative samples of adult pure-chance gamblers in Poland (n = 3,143) and France (n = 5,692). Their conclusion: "significant wins were associated with problem gambling, even when controlling for other essential factors."

That study is worth reading carefully rather than quoting as a slogan. The authors also report country-specific differences, including that significant wins in the player's environment, meaning other people's payouts, predicted problem-gambling risk only among the French sample. And these are cross-sectional data: they show an association at one point in time, not that the payout came first and caused what followed. People with gambling problems gamble more, and gambling more produces more large payouts. The arrow can run either way.

So what can you actually say? Three things, in descending order of confidence. A big payout does appear to shift behavior in the weeks right after it, in real money, at scale. Large payouts are consistently associated with problem gambling in survey populations. And the specifically early version of the claim, the one that says the first big score is the one that sets the trap, does not have strong evidence behind it. It's plausible, it's clinically familiar, and it hasn't been demonstrated.

If you've read confident articles asserting the early big win as established science, they were ahead of the data.

Why the memory still matters, even if the timing doesn't

Here's the part that survives the skepticism, and it's the part that's useful in a treatment room.

The problem with a large payout isn't the money. It's the conclusion a person draws from it. Custer's phase model may be a clinical sketch, but the cognitive machinery underneath it is well documented. In their review of cognitive distortions in pathological gambling in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, Fortune and Goodie catalogue exactly this cluster: distortions rooted in the representativeness heuristic (the gambler's fallacy, overconfidence), distortions rooted in the availability heuristic (illusory correlation, other people's payouts, and what they call inherent memory bias), and the illusion of control, the sense of having more influence over a chance outcome than you do.

Read Wint's line again through that lens. "In my head a switch went off." That's not a description of money. It's a description of a belief forming.

Memory bias is the engine that keeps it running. One large payout is a single, vivid, story-shaped event. Four thousand small losses are a texture. The payout gets rehearsed, retold, and re-lived. The losses get rounded off. This is why the accounting inside someone's head almost never matches the accounting in their bank statement, and why the first honest look at a real ledger is so often the thing that cracks the story open.

The diagnostic manual names this directly. Preoccupation with gambling is one of the nine DSM-5 criteria for gambling disorder, as Rash and Petry lay out in their review of the diagnosis in Current Addiction Reports, and the manual's own description of that criterion gives persistent thoughts of reliving past gambling experiences as its first example, alongside planning the next session and figuring out how to fund it (see the criteria as reproduced by the National Library of Medicine's Bookshelf). Reliving is a symptom, not nostalgia. If you want the full nine in plain language, we walk through them in what DSM-5 312.31 and ICD-10 F63.0 actually mean.

And the memory feeds the other criterion that does most of the damage. Once losses start, the remembered payout becomes the proof that getting back to even is possible, which is the belief that powers loss chasing. The payout doesn't need to have caused the addiction to be the thing that keeps justifying it.

The part of Wint's account that generalizes

The most instructive detail in what Wint described isn't the $300. It's Las Vegas.

He'd built a life that required him to sit in a city full of slot machines and blackjack tables, on short notice, under enormous pressure, while not gambling. That is a cue-exposure problem, and it's the ordinary shape of recovery for most people, minus the octagon. Cues don't have to be a casino floor. They're a notification, a game on in a bar, a group chat, a payday, a specific feeling at a specific hour.

The lesson isn't willpower. It's that the environment gets a vote, so it's worth deciding in advance what your environment looks like. That's the practical case for blocking gambling apps and sites before the urge arrives rather than during it, and for learning what a gambling urge actually feels like in the body so you can catch it early.

There's also a demographic point here worth naming. Wint's story starts in college, and that's typical: most American adults who gamble started before they were 21, which we covered in our piece on age of onset. Athletes sit in an especially exposed position, surrounded by betting markets built on their own sport, a dynamic we examined in the Brendan Sorsby NCAA betting case and in what Michael Jordan's gambling actually shows.

What to do with your own big-win memory

If you have one, and most people in recovery do, here's how to work with it rather than argue with it.

Write it down with the whole ledger attached. Not the payout alone. The payout, the date, and then everything that came after it, as best you can reconstruct from statements rather than memory. The memory is stored without its context. Restoring the context is the intervention.

Name the specific distortion, not the general one. "I got lucky" is too vague to do any work. Try: "I concluded I had an edge based on a single outcome in a game with a fixed house advantage." That sentence is harder to believe.

Treat the memory as a cue, not a fact. When it shows up, that's data about your current state, usually stress, boredom, or a financial squeeze. The memory is what your brain reaches for. It is not new information about your odds.

Stop grading yourself on the money. Recovery isn't a scoreboard, and there's no amount that would have made it fine. This is the reason we're abstinence-aligned here: the question isn't whether the numbers were good, it's whether gambling still gets to make decisions in your life.

Get an outside read. If several of these have been true for a while, our honest self-assessment is a reasonable starting point, and it's educational rather than diagnostic. Only a clinician can diagnose.

Wint's account is a story about a man who could sit in Las Vegas and not gamble. That capacity isn't a personality trait. It gets built, usually with help, usually with a plan made well before the moment it's needed.

If you'd like to start building yours, you can make a plan with Cope Compass. If things are urgent right now, go straight to urgent help. Support is available 24/7, and you don't have to be in crisis to use it.

Sources

• Sherdog: Anthony Wint says gambling addiction was bigger battle than 2 UFC fights. The September 3, 2026 report of Wint's September 2 interview with Ariel Helwani. Source for all quotes and for the eight-year, $300-to-$1,000, savings, and car details. Mirrored on Yahoo Sports.
• UFC: Anthony Wint athlete profile. Contender Series date and opponent, UFC debut date, and the arm-triangle finish at 4:29 of round one.
• NFL.com: One-time Jets LB Anthony Wint earns UFC contract with 34-second win. Jets tenure as a 2018 undrafted free agent, two games played, waived the following summer, and the 34-second Contender Series finish.
• The WAGER, Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions: Big Wins and Near Misses. Summary of Kassinove, J. I., & Schare, M. L. (2001), "Effects of the 'near miss' and the 'big win' on persistence at slot machine gambling," Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 15(2), 155-158, including the null result for the big win condition.
• Greo research summary of Edson et al. (2023)_A%20large-scale%20prospective%20study%20of%20big%20wins%20among%20actual%20online%20sports%20bettors_final.pdf). Sample of 36,328 bwin sports bettors, the two big-win definitions, the four-week decay, the absence of an "early" effect, and the Entain PLC funding disclosure. Full paper: Edson, Louderback, Tom, Philander, Slabczynski, Lee, & LaPlante, Computers in Human Behavior, 142, 107657 (doi:10.1016/j.chb.2023.107657).
• Lelonek-Kuleta, Tovar, Bartczuk, & Costes (2025), "Significant wins and their impacts". Addictive Behaviors, 163, 108266. Polish (n = 3,143) and French (n = 5,692) representative samples. Source for the association between significant wins and problem gambling and for the country-specific findings.
• Fortune, E. E., & Goodie, A. S. (2012), "Cognitive distortions as a component and treatment focus of pathological gambling: a review". Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 26(2), 298-310. Source for the illusion of control, availability-heuristic distortions, and inherent memory bias.
• Rash, C. J., & Petry, N. M. (2016), "Gambling Disorder in the DSM-5". Current Addiction Reports. Source for the DSM-5 criteria set, including preoccupation and chasing losses. The criteria are also reproduced by the National Library of Medicine's Bookshelf.
• Custer, R. L. (1984), "Profile of the pathological gambler," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 45(12 Pt 2), 35-38. The original three-phase model. See our stages of gambling addiction piece for how it's applied.